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Dave Ramsey said recently that “95% of the problems that happen to you are your fault”.

While I wouldn’t put the percentage quite that high personally, I do think that a huge number of financial problems are indeed our own fault.

In fact, facing up to that fact was what enabled me to get out of debt and get into better shape financially.

Essentially, I stopped making excuses, excuses that went like this:

• There was an accident, so we had to replace the car and it really put us behind.
• We hadn’t had the van that long, so that’s why we still owed money when it randomly burned to the ground one day.
• A relative died and we had to go to the funeral, and that put us deeper in debt.
• I lost my job and had trouble finding a new one because of the economy.

Those all sort of sound like things that would be beyond my control, right?

After all, I didn’t control whether someone’s brakelights were out, make our van burst into flames, or control whether or not my relative died. And I couldn’t singlehandedly control whether or not the company I worked for stayed in business.

But what about the things we COULD have controlled?

We could have been more alert and aware to try to prevent the accident. We could have had better insurance. We could have sued if it was the other parties fault and they weren’t paying. We could have not replaced the car until we had the money for it.

We could have bought gap insurance so that if something happened to the van and the insurance wasn’t enough to pay off the loan, we wouldn’t be in the hole. (Or better yet, we could have NOT leased a van we couldn’t afford in the first place.)

We could have stayed home from the funeral and sent flowers or a card instead.

I could have had a large emergency fund or paid better attention to the writing on the wall and started my job hunt earlier. (And I actually did do both of those things, but I listed this because job loss is a common excuse.)

When you accept more of the blame, you also accept more of the ability to control your finances.

And that’s a good thing.

It means you can make a positive difference in your own financial life instead of having things just “happen” to you.

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